Beyond Blackface

African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890-1930

Edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage

Publication Year: 2011

This manuscript is a collection of thirteen essays looking at the formative decades in the history of modern American mass culture. Bringing together original work from sixteen distinguished scholars in various disciplines, ranging from theater and literature to history and music, this manuscript addresses the complex roles of black performers, entrepreneurs, and consumers in American mass culture. With subjects ranging from representations of race in sheet music illustrations to African American interest in Haitian culture and with topics spanning the end of the nineteenth century to the Great Depression, these essays expand the discussion of both black culture and American popular culture during the early twentieth century. This anthology presents a fresh and multidisciplinary look at the history of African Americans and mass culture.

Cover, Title page, copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

During the gestation of this volume I have acquired an uncommonly long
list of debts. To the contributors, I am grateful for their creativity, generosity,
and patience. It has been a pleasure to work with scholars whose work
I admire greatly. This volume was also made possible through the generosity
of ...

Working in the “Kingdom of Culture”: African Americans and American Popular Culture, 1890–1930

First coda: Representations of Blackness in Nineteenth-Century Culture

The boisterous popular culture of the nineteenth century and the technological
innovations of the age generated antecedents for the mass culture of
the twentieth century. Among the most enduring and potent legacies of the
nineteenth century were a storehouse of visual representations of blackness.
These two ...

To appreciate the challenges and expectations that African American entertainers
had to contend with in the early era of twentieth- century mass culture,
we must initially turn our attention back to the antebellum decades
that saw the rise of the blackface minstrel tradition—when white men in
black face ...

Creating an Image in Black: The Power of Abolition Pictures

“One picture is worth ten thousand words,” the adman Frederick R. Barnard
said in Printer’s Ink Magazine in 1927. His quip has of course become
an adman’s proverb. Indeed, Barnard may have only given authorship to a
saying that had already been around for decades. Admen were not the first
group to ...

Second coda: The Marketplace for Black Performance

David Krasner charts the important role that black performers played in
the advent of “realism” in American popular culture. That dance provided
the opening for black performers to contribute to cultural innovation was a
testament to the newfound popularity of social dance in the United States.
Before the ...

The Real Thing

“We finally decided that as white men with blackfaces were billing themselves
‘coons,’” wrote the performer George Walker of the Williams and
Walker Theatrical Company in 1906, “Williams and Walker would do well
to bill themselves the ‘Two Real Coons,’ and so we did.”1 Walker and his
partner, Bert ...

Black Creativity and Black Stereotype: Rethinking Twentieth-Century Popular Music in America

In 1900, the Etude, a magazine devoted to articles about music and musical
performance, lambasted “the insane craze for ‘rag- time’ music” that was
then sweeping the country. It editorialized:
The counters of the music ...

Crossing Boundaries: Black Musicians Who Defied Musical Genres

The historian and realist philosopher Herbert Muller, in search of meaningful
patterns in golden ages of past societies, once declared, “All human
reality is in some sense a spiritual reality, since it perforce includes things
which are not seen.”1 The reality of African American popular entertainment
over ...

Our Newcomers to the City: The Great Migration and the Making of Modern Mass Culture

By 1910 the Chicago Defender had already begun to sound the alarm about
“a racial amusement problem.” As proof of “boisterousness and defiance of
public sentiment,” the Defender described in great detail what it called an
act of “Loud Talking in the Pekin.” The Pekin, a nationally famous race theater,
had ...

Buying and Selling with God: African American Religion, Race Records, and the Emerging Culture of Mass Consumption in the South

In 1928, Rev. J. M. Gates of Atlanta caught his friends, family, and especially
his record company, Vocalion, by surprise. One of his first- ever recordings,
a seventy- eight with the arresting title, “Death’s Black Train Is Coming,”
began to fly off the shelves. Thousands of African Americans, mostly southern,
were ...

Third coda: The Meanings and Uses of Popular Culture

Robert Jackson traces the challenges that Oscar Micheaux and other black
filmmakers faced during the transitional period in the development of the
most influential form of mass culture during the twentieth century. As the
focus of filmmaking shifted from one- reel silent spectacles to the multireel
epics ...

The Secret Life of Oscar Micheaux: Race Films, Contested Histories, and Modern American Culture

The year 1884 is hardly remembered as an important one in the history of
cinema. Indeed, Edison’s kinetoscope, widely considered the starting point
for commercial motion pictures, was still a decade off.1 For historians of
American culture, 1884 recalls less the dancing of celluloid images onscreen
than the gliding ...

Hear Me Talking to You: The Blues and the Romance of Rebellion

For the black southerners who made and listened to the music and took
it with them as they migrated north, the blues conjured the possibility of
change. The earliest blues musicians and fans had lived through the late
nineteenth- century era of racial terrorism and the hardening of segregation
into a new ...

At the Feet of Dessalines: Performing Haiti’s Revolution during the New Negro Renaissance

Black Americans during the interwar years expended a remarkable amount
of energy describing the history, culture, and current conditions of people
in the nearby republic of Haiti. Their efforts went beyond nonfiction, with a
diverse bunch of cultural producers turning their hands to the task, including ...

Fourth coda: Spectacle, Celebrity, and the Black Body

An early twentieth-century black celebrity such as Herbert Julian, the flamboyant
pilot, parachutist, and bon vivant, was inconceivable only a few decades
earlier. Leaving aside the technological innovations that made his exploits
possible, Julian’s fame was inseparable from the glitz and glamour
of the ...

The Black Eagle of Harlem

It was all so much more innocent back then. In the spring of 1923 Americans
were still enraptured with the sheer romance of flight, the authorities
had not yet taken control of the airspace over cities, and, seemingly,
pilots were pretty much free to do as they pleased. Thus it was that late in
the ...

More than a Prizefight: Joe Louis, Max Schmeling, and the Transnational Politics of Boxing

On the evening of June 22, 1938, ex- champion and German national Max
Schmeling clashed with sensational American titleholder Joe Louis for the
heavyweight crown. This much- anticipated bout between Louis, only the
second black heavyweight champion, and Schmeling, Germany’s most successful ...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.